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New insights into English count and mass nouns – the Cognitive Grammar perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2020

GRZEGORZ DROŻDŻ Open the ORCID record for GRZEGORZ DROŻDŻ [Opens in a new window]
GRZEGORZ DROŻDŻ*
Affiliation:
Institute of Linguistics University of Silesia 5 Grota-Roweckiego Street 41–205 [email protected]
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Abstract

The article deals with two of the long-standing problems in English linguistics: whether it is possible that each noun can have both count and mass senses, and the problem of determining a complete list of the regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. While there have been numerous attempts to solve each of these problems, this article shows the results of applying Cognitive Grammar to them.

The analysis covers a set of concrete nouns representative of English – sixty nouns with different ontological properties and all frequencies of occurrence. These are nouns that are classified by dictionaries as solely count and solely mass. Because of its usage-based character, the analysis scrutinises over 1,700 real-life utterances produced by native speakers of English. The analysis shows that even such nouns possess senses whose properties are the reverse of the properties of the nouns’ basic senses. A thorough examination of the nouns’ basic and extended senses leads to certain grammatical regularities of count-to-mass and mass-to-count changes. The analysis not only systematises the grammatical regularities determined so far and solves many problems that can be noticed about them, but also proposes novel regularities.

Keywords

Cognitive Grammarcountability and uncountabilityEnglish nounssense extension
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2020 , pp. 833 - 854
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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